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Fortune 500 Daily & Breaking Business NewsWed, 04 Mar 2015 00:10:30 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://1.gravatar.com/blavatar/dab01945b542bffb69b4f700d7a35f8f?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.png - Fortunehttp://fortune.com
Fortunehttps://s0.wp.com/wp-content/themes/vip/fortune/assets/images/fortunelogo.pnghttp://fortune.com25040Big tech is on salehttp://fortune.com/2015/02/20/big-tech-is-on-sale/
http://fortune.com/2015/02/20/big-tech-is-on-sale/#commentsFri, 20 Feb 2015 12:00:35 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=995709]]>Big-cap technology stocks have traditionally been prime beneficiaries of a strengthening economy. This time around is no different: The S&P 500 information technology sector returned 22% over the 12 months through early February, vs. a 17% gain for the broader S&P 500. The good news is that large tech stocks still have room to run, say experts, thanks to strong growth prospects and hefty cash stockpiles, which they can continue to deploy to their--and their investors'--advantage.

In a relative sense, mega-cap tech looks downright cheap at the moment. The price/earnings ratio for the S&P 500 -information technology sector--using estimated 2015 operating earnings--was recently 15.9, compared with 16.2 for the overall S&P 500, according to S&P Capital IQ, which recommends overweighting large-cap tech stocks. Meanwhile, tech sector earnings are forecast to grow by 11.2% in 2015, well in excess of the 8.8% rate projected for the overall S&P 500. What's more, big tech companies are collectively sitting on mountains of cash--Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Cisco alone account for about 20% of total U.S. corporate cash holdings--leaving them plenty of leeway to hike dividends and extend share-repurchase programs.

Many analysts believe that the most attractive opportunities in tech lie with old-guard companies that have been punished by declining PC sales but are actively repositioning their businesses. At Microsoft MSFT, for instance, revenues from cloud computing more than doubled in the past quarter. Credit Suisse analyst Philip Winslow believes that Microsoft's new initiatives can return it to double-digit earnings-per-share growth. Winslow believes the stock could climb to $55 over the next year, from a recent price of around $42. It also pays a robust 2.9% dividend yield.

Intel INTC, the world's -largest chipmaker, has invested heavily in producing micro-processors for mobile devices. And the company projects that revenue from its high-margin data center group--which currently represents about one-quarter of its sales--will grow by 15% a year through 2018. "To say the data center group is a hidden gem is an understatement," contends -Jefferies analyst Mark -Lipacis, who thinks Intel could jump from $34
a share to $50 this year.

GoogleGOOG has aggressively invested in its Android operating system, which drives the vast majority of smartphones. The search giant's largest source of revenue, advertising sales, rose by about 17% in 2014. J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth notes that Google is one of the few companies in the S&P 500 projected to grow both revenues and earnings at a 15% to 20% rate over the next three years and "will remain a primary beneficiary of the secular shift to online spending."

Investors can also gain diverse exposure to large-cap tech through the Technology Select Sector SPDR, an ETF that tracks the tech sector of the S&P 500.The fund, which -has a 0.15% expense ratio, holds 71 companies with an average market cap of $129 billion. Over time, Big Tech really may be beautiful.

This story is from the March 1, 2015 issue of Fortune.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/02/20/big-tech-is-on-sale/feed/0WEA.03.01.15christinaaustin2015Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on where big tech is headedhttp://fortune.com/2015/01/22/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-on-where-big-tech-is-headed/
http://fortune.com/2015/01/22/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-on-where-big-tech-is-headed/#commentsThu, 22 Jan 2015 13:00:43 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=954110]]>Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce.com, has a knack for trend-spotting. He's also a born marketer, with an uncanny ability to draw attention to subjects near and dear to him, of which there are many. He was among the first to foresee large software programs moving to the "cloud"-- a concept he played a large role in popularizing--referring to inexpensively rented software sitting remotely on a network rather than on its owner's computer. He was a heavy user of social media applications such as Facebook FB and Twitter TWTR well before other executives recognized their business potential. And from the founding days of Salesforce.com CRM 16 years ago, Benioff, 50, committed himself, his company, and his employees to charitable work, making him a role model for other businesspeople. In two interviews conducted in January--first at a dinner hosted by Fortune during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and then a few days later at his San Francisco home--Benioff opened up about a variety of topics, including how data science will affect everyone's business, where his ideas come from, why security should be companies' top priority (above even customer-service software), and how he is working with Microsoft's MSFT new CEO, Satya Nadella. Edited excerpts:

What's the most important trend you see right now in the technology industry?

We're in an AI spring.

You mean artificial intelligence?

Yes. For our company, and I think for every company, the revolution in data science will fundamentally change how we run our business because we're going to have computers aiding us in how we're interacting with our customers.

To stay stimulated, Benioff likes to be around creative people. "That's a way that I ideate."Photograph by Dan Escobar

What's an example of a company that's using data well?

You probably don't have to go very much further than looking at Uber and asking, "Why would Uber have all these data scientists?" Well, they want to have trip optimization, and they want to be able to maximize the efficiency of their fleet and ultimately provide you with the best customer service. And they think they're going to do all that through data.

What does that mean for an executive without a background in computers, like you?

Based on the simple fact that there's just a huge amount more data than ever before, our greatest challenge is making sense of that data. And we need a new generation of tools to be able to organize and view the data. We need a new generation of executives who understand how to manage and lead through data. And we also need a new generation of employees who are able to help us organize and structure our businesses around that data. When I look at the next set of technologies that we have to build in Salesforce, it's all data-science-based technology. We don't need more cloud. We don't need more mobile. We don't need more social. We need more data science.

How confident are you that nonexperts can consume this data?

Very.

Why?

Because the whole concept of data science is that the software becomes the expert, and you as the average user are able to understand what's going on.

Where do your ideas come from?

I like to be around creative people. That's a way that I ideate. I like to be in locations that I kind of feel are very creative, that stimulate me in a creative process. I also get a lot of stimulation being around my customers. The next stage of my creative process is I start to ask myself the right questions. I think the quality of your innovation is directly proportional to the quality of your questions. And I think that I'm constantly asking myself and my team questions to kind of give us clarity on what the future should look like. And I think that helps create a vision. And once you start to create a vision, you start to create a framework of creativity, and ideas come out of that.

History suggests that big companies have a very tough time staying on top. How do you approach that as the CEO of a 16-year-old technology company worth $36 billion?

To quote Andy Grove, "Only the paranoid survive." You have to be ready to have a beginner's mind and constantly be creating the future. Always be ready to start again. And don't be afraid to throw everything away and restart. I think that's what you see in people like Neil Young who are not singing the same songs they were. I mean, he's still singing "Heart of Gold" and "Old Man," but he's also writing new songs.

You're an angel investor in startups like Fitbit, ZocDoc, and Hampton Creek. Why do you spend time on such investments?

I really try to stay in touch with all the new things that are coming, the entrepreneurs, what's happening, and it's been a way for me to stay in touch with the transformations that are happening in the industry.

Are valuations of these companies out of whack?

I think it's really hard to tell right now. I think that for sure the valuations are getting really inflated. I think Warren Buffett said, "When others are greedy, become fearful. And when others are fearful, become greedy." That's a good phrase to kind of put on some of these right now. That said, some of them are certainly warranted. You see massive acceleration in revenue on some of these companies. Airbnb and Uber are two great examples. Those are companies that have multibillion-dollar revenue streams and that are growing. When the companies with the tens of millions of dollars of revenue start to reach out for those huge valuations, that's when I think we get into trouble. And that's where we're getting to right now. There's a company that I invested in with security technology, maybe only six or nine months ago at some eight-digit valuation, and six months later it has a nine-digit valuation. I don't completely understand that. I worry mostly that it defocuses the entrepreneurs away from creating great businesses.

What's the state of play in cyberterrorism?

Well, if you go to my Wikipedia page, you'll see at the bottom there's a report that I wrote in 2004 called "Cybersecurity and Crisis Prioritization." I wrote that for George W. Bush. And you'll see that we still have a crisis of prioritization regarding cybersecurity because cybersecurity is an oxymoron. And we built an Internet that was inherently insecure and unreliable. That was the nature of the Internet itself when it was built and designed in the '60s. So there is no finish line when it comes to cybersecurity. Everybody should have security as his or her No. 1 priority because we are in a highly dynamic environment. That is not going to change. By the way, I have zero arrogance when it comes to cybersecurity. I am paranoid all the time because I see all the things that are happening, and I am completely worried every single day about security, and everybody should be.

How did Salesforce.com become so chummy with Microsoft, a sworn enemy?

I was at a dinner with Satya Nadella down at the Rosewood hotel in Menlo Park. And Satya was talking about what he is trying to achieve with the company and how he wants to be more collaborative. So I decided to test him. I told him I wanted to hire one of his technologists as head of our infrastructure. What would be in it for Microsoft is the foundation of a partnership that would give us more kinds of ideas of things that we can do together. And he said okay. Now we're learning about things that we could do with Microsoft's file-management technologies and Office that we would never have known on our own.

And you think that couldn't have happened without Nadella?

The other guy [former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer] did not care about having a relationship with Salesforce. In fact, he kind of did everything he could to not have a relationship with Salesforce.

Salesforce's revenues are big and growing fast, but the company is not profitable. Do you feel it's important to produce some net income soon?

We have a huge market opportunity in front of us, so growth continues to be a top priority. No other top 10 software company is growing faster than Salesforce. As we take advantage of this growth opportunity, we are also improving profit margins. You can see that in our numbers this year, and we're committed to continuing the trend next year.

Switching to philanthropy, do you feel that the current crop of tech entrepreneurs lacks your sense of civic responsibility?

Well, I think that's the whole history of the tech industry. We have an industry that has a history of stinginess and that does not have a good history of giving back. I've been on my soapbox in trying to get these entrepreneurs to listen to me. And all I want them to know is that it's an option. That's it. It's kind of like when I said to you that the quality of your leadership is the quality of your questions. Just asking them the questions--"Well, what are you doing philanthropically with your company? And what are you doing personally with philanthropy?"--is enough.

This story is from the February 2015 issue of Fortune.

]]>http://fortune.com/2015/01/22/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-on-where-big-tech-is-headed/feed/0BEN.02.15.BenioffAdam Lashinsky, Sr. Editor at LargeSalesforce CEO Marc BenioffAdvice to tech companies on diversity: Own the storyhttp://fortune.com/2014/10/21/advice-to-tech-companies-on-diversity-own-the-story/
http://fortune.com/2014/10/21/advice-to-tech-companies-on-diversity-own-the-story/#commentsTue, 21 Oct 2014 11:15:24 +0000http://fortune.com/?p=828590]]>To all tech companies battling bad press because of a lack of workplace diversity, a piece of advice: Get ahead of the story.

After putting his foot in his mouth with a poorly worded comment on stage about women and pay, Microsoft MSFT CEO Satya Nadella is leading a new diversity effort to recruit and retain more women. The initiative will include measures to ensure equal pay, promote more diverse talent from within and train current employees to increase diversity.

"It's been a very humbling and learning experience for me," Nadella told CNBC on Monday. "I basically took my own approach to how I've approached my career and sprung it on half of humanity."

While the push seems sincere, it is tainted by the firestorm Nadella created by telling female employees that they shouldn't ask for a raise. If he had announced plans to add more women prior to his misstep it would have been taken more seriously. Now, the company has to defend itself against critics who say the diversity efforts are purely a public relations play.

Google GOOG provides an interesting case study for staying ahead of the problem. In May, the tech giant was the first to voluntarily release dismal diversity numbers that showed only 30% of its employees worldwide were women. The company continued its proactive push by publicizing a comprehensive diversity plan a couple months later. Meanwhile, Microsoft did not release its diversity data until earlier this month.

Yes, industry big wigs agree that Microsoft would not be pushing diversity as aggressively as it is now without Nadella's latest gaffe. But maybe that's not a problem. Telle Whitney, CEO and president of the Anita Borg Institute, a California-based nonprofit promoting the recruitment of women in technology, said if it takes a public embarrassment for the CEO to take the issue seriously, "more power to him." Unlike Twitter CRM CEO Dick Costolo who reacted defensively last year to criticisms of sexism in the tech industry, Nadella is using this latest media rant as a learning opportunity.

"The comments that he made about pay show a lack of knowledge about the work that we do," Whitney added. "What encouraged me is that he took this as a moment to be reflective."

Vivek Wadhwa, who has written extensively about diversity as fellow at Stanford University focused on corporate governance and director of research at Duke University’s entrepreneurship center, is also encouraged by Nadella's latest campaign. The misstep made him aware of the issues, said Wadhwa. Without it, he may not have taken such a hard look to learn where Microsoft could improve moving forward.

"A lot of good came from it," Wadhwa said. "It also sent another shock to the tech industry so that other CEOs also started becoming aware. Expect that we will see a series of changes at Microsoft over the next year that address the problem."

Yet Nancy McKinstry, CEO of global information services firm Wolters Kluwer, knows first-hand that a reactionary approach to diversity problems is generally ill-advised. Since becoming CEO in 2003, McKinstry has increased the number of women in management positions from 20% to 50% by fostering a diverse environment from her first day on the job.

"Women looking to join Wolters Kluwer see the large numbers of women in management and think, 'I can do that in this organization," she told Fortune.

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/10/21/advice-to-tech-companies-on-diversity-own-the-story/feed/0Fortune Brainstorm Tech 2014 Satya Nadella Microsoft CEOcarolinefairchildThe latest from Groupon: A tablet for retailershttp://fortune.com/2014/05/29/the-latest-from-groupon-a-tablet-for-retailers/
http://fortune.com/2014/05/29/the-latest-from-groupon-a-tablet-for-retailers/#commentsThu, 29 May 2014 19:35:49 +0000http://beta.fortune.com/?p=500378]]>You could argue there’s no company better than Groupon GRPN at helping small, local merchants get new customers to walk through the front door. With its latest brand extension — a tablet point-of-sale (POS) system — the daily deals pioneer wants to help merchants keep them there long after the first transaction.

Called Gnome (pronounced “Genome”), the technology connects via a cloud service to Groupon’s account database where it can redeem vouchers electronically. If the voucher-holder uses Groupon’s Android or iPhone mobile apps — which more than 80 million people have downloaded — the transaction happens through a Bluetooth wireless connection. For customers not using smartphones, the cashier can access accounts by typing in the voucher number or the person’s name.

Groupon already sells an iPad POS system, called Breadcrumb, to high-end restaurants. This new solution, likely to be priced starting at about $10 per month, is targeted at existing Groupon customers, at least half of which still rely on old cash registers, said Rich Williams, senior vice president of global marketing for Groupon.

Because Gnome will collect information about what people are buying and how often they visit, nail salons, spas, restaurants, boutiques and other small businesses can create more sophisticated customer relationship management systems. “We can put our core relevance engine to work at the customer level. The more we learn, the better job we can do at showing great and relevant deals,” Williams said. “They will have a better shot at having a customer come back.”

Gnome is being tested in a handful of markets, and Groupon is rolling out the system across North America gradually in the coming months.

As a standalone POS system for small businesses, Gnome will encounter plenty of competition including offerings from legacy players like NCR NCR and upstarts such as Revel Systems and ShopKeep.

But the underlying relationship management and marketing personalization technology that come with it are tough to ignore. “Groupon has the ability to offer a suite of services that is unique to the merchant that will help them more effectively market their business,” said Tom Forte, managing director and senior research analyst for Telsey Advisory Group.

Groupon’s rapidly growing mobile presence ways heavily in its favor — as of March 2014, 54% of Groupon transactions were completed using its apps. But getting merchants to embrace digital POS technologies will be an uphill battle. “There are many examples of compelling technology to drive mobile payments, tablet-based payment systems,” Forte said. “But it’s hard to know when adoption rates are going to materially improve.”

A quest to remain relevant

Gnome is the second Groupon brand extension this month. In early May, the company launched a new service called Basics, to appeal to people that buy things in bulk. Right now, those offerings are limited to things like dietary supplements, paper goods and soap. Groupon has also been highly acquisitive: In January it completed its buyouts of LivingSocial Korea, the company behind Ticket Monster; and Ideeli, a platform for running flash sales for fashion and apparel. “Wherever you are, we want to play,” Williams said.

Sucharita Mulpuru-Kodali, vice president and principal analyst with Forrester Research, said diversification is necessary for Groupon to stay relevant. “The core Groupon model is mature, hard to grow,” she said. “There are no more daily deals companies that they could acquire.”

The challenge will be moving to a model that offers “great value” to consumers, while allowing the small businesses that rely on the platform for marketing to grow profitably. “They’ve gotten better at personalization . . . They are reducing friction,” Mulpuru-Kodali said. “At this point in time, for them to get profitable and to get new merchants, that is what they need to do.”

One of Groupon’s most important strategic bets is Marketplace, which people can visit proactively to search for specific goods and services. “This is a company transition from daily deals to what they call ‘pull marketing,’ where consumers can choose from deals,” Forte said.

The platform is a core component of its quest to build deeper relationships with both consumers and merchants. During March, 9% of Groupon’s total customer traffic in North America ran searches, up from 8% in December 2013. Investors have been impatient with the transition, Forte said, but the company anticipates an acceleration of this shift during the second half of 2014. “Management is drawing the line in the sand,” he said.

As of May 29, Groupon shares were trading slightly above $6, compared with nearly $12 per share at the end of December 2013.

For its first quarter ended March 31, Groupon reported revenue of $757.6 million, an increase of 26% from the year-ago quarter. Its net loss for the quarter was $37.8 million. First-quarter gross billings — which measure the total dollar value of goods and services purchased by customers through its platforms — were $1.82 billion.

“We’re on track with our plans to 2014 to invest in the growth of Local, improve our Goods margins, and drive profitability in our international operations,” said Groupon CEO Eric Lefkofsky, in a statement. “As a result, we have further confidence in our results for the back half of the year and have increased our full-year outlook.”

The company ended the first quarter with $1 billion in cash and cash equivalents. During the quarter, it repurchased slightly less than 3.1 million shares of Class A common stock at an average price of $9.58. The repurchase program is ongoing through August 2015.

]]>http://fortune.com/2014/05/29/the-latest-from-groupon-a-tablet-for-retailers/feed/0140529114847-groupon-gnome-tablet-pos-620xaburcunoyan90How Ben Lerer competes with Amazonhttp://fortune.com/2014/02/24/how-ben-lerer-competes-with-amazon/
http://fortune.com/2014/02/24/how-ben-lerer-competes-with-amazon/#commentsMon, 24 Feb 2014 18:35:01 +0000http://test-alley.fortune.com/2014/02/24/how-ben-lerer-competes-with-amazon/]]>The Thrillist Media Group CEO on e-commerce, what went wrong at Fab, and why he believes his company can be a $1 billion business.

FORTUNE — With 9 million active readers, Thrillist Media Group will bring in more than $100 million in revenue this year, according to chief executive Ben Lerer. During a recent visit to the Thrillist New York offices, Fortune asked him for his thoughts on the future of commerce.

It’s the first in an occasional series we’re tentatively calling “Five Minutes on the Future.” Here’s what Lerer had to say.

***

First there was Commerce 1.0. That was Amazon AMZN, eBay EBAY, Zappos [which now belongs to Amazon -Ed.]. This was all about easier, faster, and cheaper. How do you find things fast? You go to Google GOOG or you go to Amazon. Both are about fulfilling existing demand. You know what you want and you go and get it. It's not about discovery. It's a very deliberate process, and efficiency is of the utmost importance.

Then there was Commerce 2.0. That's Web 2.0 sites like Gilt or Fab. It was all about inspiration shopping. They're creating demand out of thin air. And some of those businesses are really good businesses. Many of these businesses hold less inventory, do more consignment, do more drop ship, but ultimately don’t have the staples in their categories available at all times. They are all about creating new demand and really not focused on capturing demand that already exists [which is where the most volume ultimately sits]. It's inspiration shopping. It's all about curation, deals, and time-based events.

But, at the end of the day, most people spend money on things they need. That’s why Fab isn’t the multi-billion dollar opportunity the press wanted it to be. Sure [the well-funded e-commerce company] had its mismanagement issues, but at the end of the day there was nothing on that site that was something that you really needed.

Now we’re at the beginning of Commerce 3.0. Every day you surprise and delight people by showing them interesting things, and then you layer on great storytelling on a daily basis. But then you also have the persistent inventory in the staple categories. People come to your store more often because they never know what they're going to find and what they could discover. When they get there, they spend more money buying the basics that they actually need. It's been four years since we acquired JackThreads, and we've gotten really good into making a reader into a shopper and a shopper into a reader. We will do more than $100 million in revenues this year, and I believe we can be a $1 billion business.

How do you compete with Amazon? By having things that Amazon doesn't have. At Thrillist, we sell you stuff you need that you can't find anywhere else. Almost half of what we sell is exclusive to us, with a big portion of that stuff actually being made by us. You can’t price-check an item on Amazon that they don’t cover.

Plus, fashion is a category that is particularly tough for a company like Amazon that is so focused on the Commerce 1.0 model. Inspiration isn’t in its DNA, and it thinks about curation as something that an algorithm does, not a brand or a person. This is counter to what social media is all about, and people who are raised on social media don’t only want an algorithm telling them what they should buy. They want to trust the brands that sell them things, and fashion is a category that Amazon doesn’t have trust in.

FORTUNE — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer isn’t done saying goodbye just yet. After a heartfelt speech to employees late last month, on Monday Ballmer published his final letter to shareholders, taking the opportunity to extoll the company’s ongoing “transformation” into a devices and services provider and highlight its key milestones over the last year.

“We brought Windows 8 to the world; we brought consistent user experiences to PCs, tablets, phones and Xbox; and we made important advancements to Windows Server, Windows Azure, Microsoft Dynamics and Office 365,” Ballmer wrote in the letter. “We are proud of what we accomplished this year and continue to be passionate about delivering better devices and services more quickly.”

Ballmer admitted that Microsoft is still in the “early days” of any kind of turnaround, and while he won’t be around to finish carrying out the strategy he laid out last year, he also said he believes the company’s best days are still ahead. In late August the outgoing CEO announced he would step down sometime in the next 12 months. Microsoft’s MSFT board of directors is still searching for a successor, but rumored candidates include Alan Mulally, the current CEO of Ford F, and Nokia’s NOKStephen Elop (Microsoft recently announced it would buy the phonemaker’s device business).

Ballmer has made a lot of changes at Microsoft over the last year, including a giant reorg. “… we are well underway in implementing the new organization structure announced in July,” Ballmer said in the letter to shareholders. “The teams are working together in new and exciting ways. The key change we made is deceptively simple but profoundly powerful: Instead of organizing our teams around individual products, we've organized by function, including, for example, engineering, sales, marketing and finance. It ensures we have one strategy and work as one team with one set of shared goals.”

Last month the CEO made another big move — shelling out $7.2 billion for Nokia’s devices and services business. “This is a signature event in our transformation and will bring together the best mobile device work of Microsoft and Nokia,” Ballmer wrote. “It will accelerate our growth with Windows Phone while strengthening our overall device ecosystem and our opportunity.”

But it’s still not clear how Microsoft plans to integrate the struggling phonemaker — and how it plans to drive demand for its mobile operating system and phones, even now that it will control the hardware too (Apple AAPL and Google GOOG control about 86% of the smartphone market; Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system commands a meager 3.7%).

But Ballmer remained upbeat in his letter to shareholders, infusing it with some of his signature flair: “This is a unique letter for me — the last shareholder letter I will write as the CEO of the company I love,” wrote Ballmer. “We have always believed that technology will unleash human potential and that is why I have come to work every day with a heart full of passion for more than 30 years.”

FORTUNE — It’s hard to get excited about expense reports. But Steve Singh, CEO of travel and expense management software provider Concur Technologies, says the corporate travel experience is about to get much, much better. A big part of that improvement will come from tapping into some of the trends on the consumer side, says Singh. To that end, about two years ago Concur acquired TripIt, a consumer-facing app that aggregates travelers’ itineraries. In 2012, the company launched the “Perfect Trip Fund,” allocating funds to invest in startups that respond “to the needs of business travelers, the companies they work for, and the suppliers that serve them.”

Last April, Concur CNQR also began opening up some of its APIs (short for application programming interface, or tools used by developers to write apps). That’s meant small companies like TripLingo, which sells a mobile translation tool, can easily integrate with Concur’s offerings — sending helpful phrases to a user about to travel abroad, for example. To tap into more innovation, Concur held its first developer conference in San Francisco earlier this week. We caught up with Singh to find out how he’s trying to change his company — and the $250 billion business travel industry — and why expense reports are still so cumbersome.

FORTUNE: What led you to start making some of the more recent changes at Concur?

Singh: We had this view of what business travel ought to be. When we first introduced it, we called it “The Perfect Trip” and the reaction was that this was kind of idealistic. Our view was, Why is it that something like the perfect trip can’t be a reality? One of the early realizations was that there just wasn’t a lot of capital available for companies that wanted to drive a massive amount of innovation into corporate travel, but there was a ton of capital for consumer travel. Why? The cost to get into corporate travel was very high, you had to build out a massive sales force to sell into companies. The reason why we looked at how to work with other companies is that there’s no way we can solve all of the needs of business travelers ourselves. So we built out a platform that everyone can build on.

What the iPhone did is drive consumerization of IT — apps that you and I could easily download and get engaged with. And that started pushing massive demand on the corporate side — people were saying, Why aren’t my corporate tools as easy to use as my consumer tools? What smart companies did is they said, We can actually build all these enterprise apps in a consumer model, so it’s as simple to use as any consumer app. You can download it on the App Store and just start using it. That’s forced every supplier to corporations to deal with the fact that the individual is now also a part of the decision process. It’s not just a corporate purchase anymore. It’s you and I saying what kind of tools we like and that influences heavily what companies buy.

I don’t look forward to filing an expense report and don’t know many people who do. How are you trying to improve your core travel and expense management software?

Our objective is to get the idea of an expense report to go away. Our view is we think we can actually populate the expense report as you take your trip. When you get off the airplane, we know you took a flight. Why don’t we take the electronic receipt from the airline and automatically link it to your expense report, which we are already doing. The exact same thing for a hotel, or even dining or taxis. You should be able to use your phone to book a cab, pay for it and then have the receipt automatically go into Concur. Today if you use our full suite of products, then about 80% to 90% of the expense report we can do for you automatically. We haven’t gotten that last 20% but that will take time, and we’ll get to that. If you compare this to 20 years ago, what a massive change.

More and more business travelers are booking through sites like Airbnb [an external website for booking rental accommodations]. Are you partnering with them?

We open up our platforms to companies like Airbnb so you can actually have an option within Airbnb to say, send this to my Concur expense report. It depends on the use case, but the idea behind an open platform is why can’t you open this up to everybody in the world.

How far along are you in opening those APIs?

This is our first developers conference. We announced the Concur T&E Cloud about a year ago, and in the first six months we saw 50 application developers build applications on top of our platform. Today we hosted about 160 developers who are also building on top of the platform. We expect over the course of the year to see that number going to 500 or so. When you think about the number of travel apps sitting in the App Store you’re talking about 20,000 or thereabouts. Every single one of these apps has the opportunity to integrate onto our platform. Give us a few years, and what you’ll find is that’s exactly what will happen.

FORTUNE — Does the world really need another file storage service? Probably not, but Salesforce.com CRM claims its new product, Salesforce Files, isn’t just any ordinary “repository.”

The San Francisco-based company announced an earlier version of the tool, a file-sharing service called Chatterbox, at last year’s Dreamforce event (its annual customer lovefest, hosted by its uber-enthusiastic CEO Marc Benioff). But it says it has evolved the product into something much more expansive. The new and improved Salesforce Files, unveiled at a press event on Thursday, lets users access any file directly through their Salesforce feed. That means that anyone using the company’s sales, service, or marketing software tools can access files that normally reside elsewhere — like on Box or Microsoft’s MSFT SharePoint — without having to open a separate application.

“For the first time ever, customer companies can unlock files from third-party repositories such as Box, Google Drive, or SharePoint and make them mobile and social, all on a single trusted platform,” the company said in a press release issued this week.

Wasting less time on looking for documents sounds great and all, but it probably won’t move the needle on Salesforce’s overall business. In other words, it’s a “nice-to-have” feature, but not likely to attract more net new customers. Nor is it an entirely new product category for Salesforce, which has dabbled in the space for a while now. And while Salesforce is able to allow for easy access of files inside its own applications, plenty of customers have already turned to Box, Dropbox, Hightail (formerly YouSendIt — what kind of rebranding geniuses are these software companies hiring?) and a slew of other providers for their file sharing and syncing needs. Even if Salesforce’s version can access files from within these disparate other providers, it’s still offering another repository of sorts — or rather, a repository for repositories.

Salesforce is now the top provider of customer-relationship management software — which remains its bread and butter — and one of the top cloud companies around. But it has had to stretch outside of its comfort zone, developing software that appeals not just to sales teams but to other divisions across organizations. Salesforce Files makes sense given that the trend is to provide as much functionality and social features as possible within — not outside — of existing applications. But it’s no magic bullet for Salesforce. Investors, customers, and partners will be watching the company come this November, when the next Dreamforce confab takes place in San Francisco. Expect to see more new products, plus some high-wattage keynotes, then.

FORTUNE — You might assume that a young, fast-growing enterprise software company like Tableau Software is all about the cloud — a.k.a. selling and distributing applications over the web. But the Seattle-based company, which started out as a Stanford University research project in 2003, is only now launching a software-as-a-service version of its business intelligence tool, Tableau Server.

In May, Tableau DATA made its glamorous debut on the public market, raising around $254 million in its initial public offering and closing its first day of trading at just over $50 per share, up more than 60% from its IPO price of $31. (Speaking of IPOs, Tableau CEO Christian Chabot will be discussing the slew of recently public enterprise companies at Fortune‘s upcoming Brainstorm Tech conference next week). In recent months, things have mostly gone uphill for the company, which has now amassed over 12,000 total customers. But Tableau’s success, at least up until now, has been due to selling its product the “old” way, via somewhat pricey on-premise software licenses.

Now, the company says it can attract more customers by letting them create, edit, and share dashboards and reports online. Users will no longer need to use a virtual private network to access the data visualization tool from Internet-connected laptops and tablets, which can save time for sales reps and other on-the-field workers. More importantly, for an annual fee of $500 per user, Tableau thinks more companies — small and large — will give its big data tools a try.

There is no minimum number of users for the new web-based product, and companies can add more licenses when they want. They can also migrate to Tableau Server, the on-premise version, if they choose to manage the tool in-house, on their own servers. Both products let customers migrate data from multiple sources, including Google’s GOOG BigQuery and Salesforce.com CRM, as well as traditional databases. The company says its mission is to “help people see and understand their data” regardless of where that data lives.” (The unofficial mission of any publicly traded company: make money for shareholders.)

It’s interesting to note that Tableau isn’t the only newish enterprise company that has been relatively slow to adopt a software-as-a-service model. Another big data company, Splunk SPLK, launched a cloud-based, subscription version of its product just last summer. “Getting data in the cloud is challenging,” says Francois Ajenstat, director of product management at Tableau. According to Ajenstat, about 200 corporate customers are already using Tableau Online.

But while Tableau has been praised for its functionality, ease-of-use and, well, beauty, it’s also got a growing list of competitors, including QlikTech QLIK and much larger players like Microsoft MSFT and IBM IBM. And just like Tableau, they’re also reaching for the cloud.

FORTUNE — Intel was slow to enter the mobile market, but the chipmaker says it is now taking steps to speed up development of its Atom chip line for mobile devices. It’s also rushing ahead to provide silicon (and services) to another potentially hot market: wearables, a new product category which includes connected glasses and watches.

The company’s top executives, new CEO Brian Krzanich and president Renee James, met with reporters Friday morning in San Francisco to answer questions about their strategy to push Intel into mobile and up-and-coming markets like wearables. The duo, both long-time Intel INTC insiders, assumed their new positions about a month and a half ago, when former CEO Paul Otellini stepped down. (In other changes, on Thursday the company announced that CTO Justin Rattner is stepping down from his role because he has hit the company’s mandatory retirement age.) Over the last few weeks, Krzanich has repositioned many of the company’s main product groups under his supervision. He has also vowed to speed up development of Intel’s Atom chips for smartphones and tablets.

At Friday morning’s event, Krzanich admitted that in the past, the company hadn’t put enough focus on getting its chips optimized for mobile devices. “As companies get bigger and more and more successful, accepting these big changes gets harder,” said Krzanich, adding that Intel may have thought it could slow the transition to mobile by pulling people back to PCs. “There was a basic fundamental flaw in that logic,” said the CEO.

The PC market has been highly challenging, despite Intel’s attempts to push ultrabooks — a.k.a. super-thin laptops. While the Santa Clara-based company’s chips still power the vast majority of PCs, that market is contracting. Meanwhile, Intel has less than 1% market share in tablets and smartphones.

Former CEO Otellini had also tried to pave the way to greater market share in mobile, hiring executives from Palm and Apple AAPL to steer the company’s mobile efforts. But progress was slow. On Friday, Krzanich and James pointed out a few recent “wins” — like Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 3 tablet, which features an Intel processor. At the same time, companies like Qualcomm QCOM, which licenses competing chip technology from ARM Holdings, still dominate the smartphone and tablet market and have had a huge head start. And while Intel’s new leadership is trying to move faster, it seems to be sticking to the company’s historic microprocessor design, x86.

“There’s an architectural advantage to x86 beyond compatibility,” said James, referring to the fact that Intel chips work well with computers that run on the Microsoft MSFT Windows operating system and mainstream applications.

Intel’s new leadership also talked about fresh opportunities in other areas. Krzanich said he thinks growth in the wearables market — which includes connected devices like glasses, earpieces, and watches — is going to be explosive. He also said he thinks Intel has a winning model for providing a whole “ecosystem” to support this new market, not just as the chip supplier. Krzanich, who owns a pair of Google’s GOOG connected glasses, wouldn’t elaborate on what exactly Intel is doing on this end, but hinted at a slew of supporting services. “I think it will take about two years to roll that plan out, but I think you'll see an explosion,” said Krzanich. Unlike with mobile, it appears Intel is trying to get ahead of the game on this one.

]]>http://fortune.com/2013/07/01/intels-new-ceo-is-ready-to-embrace-mobile/feed/0srivathslakshmiWas Yammer worth $1.2 billion?http://fortune.com/2013/06/25/was-yammer-worth-1-2-billion/
http://fortune.com/2013/06/25/was-yammer-worth-1-2-billion/#commentsTue, 25 Jun 2013 13:59:41 +0000http://test-alley.fortune.com/2013/06/25/was-yammer-worth-1-2-billion/]]>FORTUNE — It's been one year since Microsoft announced it was acquiring Yammer, a social networking tool for companies, for a whopping $1.2 billion. The plan? Use Yammer's software as a social layer across Microsoft's products and keep the smaller, San Francisco-based company as independent as possible. Twelve months in, Microsoft still has plenty of integration work ahead of it. But the Redmond-based tech giant is also ready to tout some of what it's already managed to accomplish with Yammer. And what Yammer's been able to accomplish with Microsoft.

Yammer is still more-or-less independent, though its marketing department now reports to Redmond. (Microsoft is rumored to be in the midst of a much larger restructuring effort that’s said to help focus the company on devices and services.) Yammer’s office is housed in the same Mid-Market building that hot startups like Twitter and One Kings Lane call home. And founders David Sacks — of PayPal (EBAY) fame — and Adam Pisoni are still with the company.”We realized we have a lot more in common with Microsoft than we thought,” says Sacks, who is also the CEO of Yammer. He says one of his first conversations with Microsoft MSFT CEO Steve Ballmer, before the acquisition closed, made him realize Microsoft understood Yammer’s consumer-led appeal and that the company was ready to move fast.

Indeed, Microsoft has worked with Yammer to add a social layer to its Dynamics CRM (customer relationship management) application and has started baking Yammer features into SharePoint, a collaboration tool, and Office 365, an online, subscription-based version of its popular Office suite of productivity apps. “We didn’t have to rewrite code from scratch,” says Jared Spataro, senior director for SharePoint product marketing at Microsoft. “We could start connecting with what they already had. And the Yammer team had strong points of view on what they were going to accomplish and how to get it done.”

According to Spataro, the pricey acquisition made sense for Microsoft because Yammer enables it to get more social features integrated faster. Yammer was also attractive because its software is delivered via the cloud and direct to consumers, another direction Microsoft is trying to push toward. And Yammer moves fast — both in the way it develops and delivers software — an attribute the larger company was hoping to emulate. “The way their product has been developed — the rapid innovation in the cloud, and releases every week — that has not only continued but has been adopted by other parts of our cloud organization here at Microsoft,” says Spataro.

While Yammer has impacted the way things are done at Microsoft, the acquiring company has also had its effect on Yammer, though it’s mostly tried to keep its hands off and let things run as they always have. For example, Microsoft “simplified” the way Yammer is priced, cutting the number of payment packages from four to two (it also says it is committed to continue selling a standalone version of Yammer for customers who just want an enterprise social network). Yammer has continued to grow. Last month Microsoft said Yammer’s sales grew 259% year-over-year, though it has not divulged actual revenue. Yammer now has nearly 8 million users, but the vast majority of them use a free version of the product. Customers include TGI Friday's and GlaxoSmithKline GSK. Telefonica TEF, a Spanish telecommunications player, has been a (paying) Yammer customer for several years and is a long-time Microsoft customer. “Our community was feeding back to us that they liked Yammer, and I wasn't inclined to change it,” says Phil Jordan, group CIO for Telefonica. “Same with Office 365. We've always been a big Microsoft shop.”

Of course, while Microsoft has staying power it (and Yammer) is facing a sea of small and large rivals. Salesforce.com CRM, to name just one example, is the top CRM vendor and has its own social networking layer, called Chatter, built right on top. What’s more, the jury’s still out on how transformative these social networking tools are to begin with. While Facebook FB has taken off in the consumer world, companies don’t necessarily want to pay monthly usage fees for a glorified Twitter feed. So there is still a lot of education that needs to take place around what these tools can really do to help make employees happier and more efficient.

Yammer was a successful exit — $1.2 billion for a company that launched at a TechCrunch conference in 2008 ain’t bad. But founders Sacks and Pisoni are startup guys at heart. They say they’re happy, of course, but statistics show the vast majority of startup founders leave an acquiring company within two years of an acquisition. Product integration efforts aside, if Microsoft can figure out how to hold on to Yammer’s core team for a while longer — and infuse itself with more of the smaller company’s fast-moving style — then the $1.2 billion it paid may just turn out to be worth it.

]]>http://fortune.com/2013/06/25/was-yammer-worth-1-2-billion/feed/0srivathslakshmiSamsung’s Kitchen ambitionhttp://fortune.com/2013/06/17/samsungs-kitchen-ambition/
http://fortune.com/2013/06/17/samsungs-kitchen-ambition/#commentsMon, 17 Jun 2013 14:25:18 +0000http://test-alley.fortune.com/2013/06/17/samsungs-kitchen-ambition/Can the Korean electronics giant pull a smartphone-like win in the home? ]]>FORTUNE — Can Samsung Electronics conquer kitchen appliances in the same way it has conquered televisions and smartphones?

The Korean tech conglomerate, already the market leader in sales of TVs and mobile phones with advanced computing capabilities, says it also aims to be the world's No. 1 purveyor of home appliances by 2015. That's a lofty goal considering that today it is the No. 5 player in refrigerators and automatic washer/dryers, according to market share data from Euromonitor International, and isn't in Euromonitor's top 5 in dishwashers, ovens or microwaves.

But Boo-Keun Yoon, co-CEO of Samsung Electronics, believes the company can win over global consumers by bringing innovation and a high-tech approach to refrigerators, ovens, air conditioners, and washing machines. "These are products that consumers are very emotional about, but there's a lot of room for innovation in home appliances." Yoon says.

Yoon was in New York last week for the opening of Samsung House, a "pop-up" showroom for the company's housewares. Among the products on display: a refrigerator with a built-in SodaStream machine to dispense fresh bubby water, and an oven that allows customers to segment shelves to cook at different temperatures.

Samsung isn't a newcomer to the business. Indeed, the company developed its first refrigerator for the Korean market in 1974, and many Americans first came to know the Samsung brand through its countertop microwaves. The company says its home appliance business in the U.S. started to take off on 2005.

In recent years Samsung has been steadily gaining ground. Its share of worldwide refrigerator sales has edged up from 3.5% in 2007 to 6.8% last year, according to Euromonitor. But it has a long way to go to overtake market leader Whirlpool WHR, which boasts 16% share.

Yoon's success running the television business at Samsung certainly will help pave the way for his home appliance ambitions. Many of the same retailers who sell televisions also sell fridges and ranges and dishwashers; Samsung would be able to use its scale and market power to secure prime placement for its kitchen gear.

But perhaps the company's success in smartphones provides the better roadmap for its plans to dominate the home. Six years ago the company had single-digit market share in those advanced mobile devices, behind Nokia NOK, Blackberry BBRY, Apple AAPL and even HTC. Today the company sells nearly one in three smartphones worldwide.

Samsung's success is partly attributable to the breadth of its product line: It makes smartphones that sell at a variety of price points. In the emerging world, many consumers in the rising middle class tap Samsung for their first smart device and trade up into higher-end products as their disposable income grows.

Yoon hints at a similar strategy in home appliances. "The goal is to integrate innovation in each product, not just for the premium market but for all segments," he says.

And collaboration with Samsung's smartphone business provides Yoon with an interesting opportunity to develop some of the innovations he believes will drive the company's appliance sales. Samsung already makes a washer that the homeowner can remotely control and monitor from a smartphone, and Yoon envisions a suite of software and "smart" appliances that can help the user manage his or her household.

Samsung's Smart Control app for its front-load washer is already available for some iPhones and Samsung Galaxy devices. But some analysts speculate that Samsung could develop its own mobile operating system (competing with Apple's iOS and Google's GOOG Android, which Samsung uses for the Galaxy line) that is specifically designed to link together its portfolio of TVs, phones, appliances, and even medical devices.

Yoon notes that Samsung is involved in the development of Tizen, an open-source operating system for TVs and phones and entertainment devices. But he is quick to note that for now he does not subscribe to a one-system fits all model. "Our philosophy," he says, "is to give users the best experience."

]]>http://fortune.com/2013/06/17/samsungs-kitchen-ambition/feed/0srivathslakshmiWhat I learned at Facebook’s big data bootcamphttp://fortune.com/2013/06/13/what-i-learned-at-facebooks-big-data-bootcamp/
http://fortune.com/2013/06/13/what-i-learned-at-facebooks-big-data-bootcamp/#commentsThu, 13 Jun 2013 11:18:02 +0000http://test-alley.fortune.com/2013/06/13/what-i-learned-at-facebooks-big-data-bootcamp/]]>FORTUNE — You may have heard of Facebook's engineering bootcamp, a six-week onboarding program for new hires to learn the ins and outs of the company’s code base and culture. But over the last few months, the social networking giant has quietly rolled out another program that’s not just for engineers — rather, it’s focused on teaching big data tools to all employees.

“We really want everyone to feel like they are capable of using data,” says Ken Rudin, head of analytics at Facebook FB. “Then analysts [a.k.a. data crunchers] aren’t a bottleneck to getting things done. They’re there for doing the SWAT team type of things, things that take a little extra scale and more depth than your average person would have.”

Facebook employs about 100 so-called analysts (and lists plenty of open positions for its analytics team). But Rudin, formerly VP of analytics and platform technologies at Zynga ZNGA, says he wants to promote a culture in which everyone uses data to test and ultimately roll out new products, design changes, and other improvements. To that end, Rudin and his team have experimented with different kinds of tutorial sessions on using data analytics tools. Last November, they launched the first two-week session on big data and are now running courses back to back; there is a wait-list for upcoming sessions. Each two-week course consists of up to 25 employees — product managers, customer service workers, and members of the company’s infrastructure team, for example. They come in every day for two weeks, sitting in on about three hours of lectures each morning and then taking the rest of the day to work on self-selected projects. Each employee is assigned a mentor for the duration of the two weeks and is expected to work on a real company problem (such as how to use data to provide better customer service).

Facebook has a history of data-driven decisions and running tests on real users to try out new products. The company has developed homegrown big data tools to help all sorts of employees — not just analysts — quickly and easily run queries on its immense data sets. HiPal, for example, is a tool that aims to make analyzing petabytes of data easy for anyone in the company. Gatekeeper is another tool that manages the hundreds of user tests Facebook runs each day and makes sure that they provide “statistically meaningful results.”

But Rudin stresses that it’s not just about having the right tools — it’s about the right mindset. The company’s big data bootcamp teaches employees how to conduct exploratory analysis and come up with hypotheses. It also trains them to effectively communicate and present their findings. “If we continue down the path that we're going, and I think we'll get there, then we’ll have a culture where everyone feels that data is something they should be using as part of their job,” says Rudin. “Everybody should be doing analysis.”

Of course, Rudin and his team are also using data to figure out how to evolve their new bootcamp — what type of curriculum is most effective and how they can best scale the courses. While finding talented analysts is hard (not to mention expensive), putting Facebook’s nearly 5,000 employees through a voluntary boot camp on crunching numbers isn’t easy either. So will other companies follow suit? A two-week intensive course makes sense for Facebook’s culture, where a bootcamp-style program has become a rite of passage for incoming engineers. But other companies could benefit from training employees to adopt a big data toolset — and mindset.

]]>http://fortune.com/2013/06/13/what-i-learned-at-facebooks-big-data-bootcamp/feed/0srivathslakshmiThe IPO market is back — for enterprise techhttp://fortune.com/2013/05/20/the-ipo-market-is-back-for-enterprise-tech/
http://fortune.com/2013/05/20/the-ipo-market-is-back-for-enterprise-tech/#commentsMon, 20 May 2013 14:42:10 +0000http://test-alley.fortune.com/2013/05/20/the-ipo-market-is-back-for-enterprise-tech/]]>FORTUNE — If you hadn't heard of Tableau Software before its glamorous debut on the public market last Friday, you're not alone. The Seattle-based company makes visual analytics tools for technical and non-technical employees alike but is far from a household name. And yet, it raised around $254 million in its initial public offering and closed its first day of trading at just over $50 per share, up more than 60% from its IPO price of $31. Not bad for a data visualization tool.

Tableau DATA has tapped into one of the hottest trends in enterprise technology — the overused buzzword that is big data. The company allows users to query and present large data sets using a graphical interface (think bright and colorful interactive charts). "We just finished a two-week roadshow and found that there's tremendous interest in data and analytics and the power that data can bring to improving lives," says Christian Chabot, co-founder and CEO of Tableau.

Tableau was lucky enough to get the ticker symbol "DATA," but it's just one in a line of several recent and upcoming enterprise tech and big data IPOs. Another software company, Marketo MKTO, also made its public market debut last Friday and saw its share price rise 78% on its first day of trading. (Marketo sells cloud-based software for, you guessed it, marketing departments.) Of course, the march of enterprise tech IPOs actually started last year. And while consumer-focused Facebook's FB stock may be down 30% from its IPO price one year ago, less sexy companies like Splunk SPLK, Workday WDAY and Palo Alto Networks PANW have fared better.

So who’s next? There’s file storage site Box, mobile device management player Good Technology and security software maker FireEye, to name a few. Then again, despite the recent high-profile IPOs of a handful of enterprise software companies, probably the most anticipated public offering is that of microblogging site Twitter, currently valued (by some estimates) at a whopping $10 billion.

Unlike Twitter, Tableau needed to go public to help build "awareness and credibility." The company’s current customer list includes heavyweights like Wal-Mart WMT and eBay EBAY plus regional hospitals and government agencies. “It's not so much about pivoting from one customer to another as it is about increasing all customers,” says Chabot. “Our products can be used by anyone who needs to use a spreadsheet.” Of course, Tableau has a long way to go before anyone who needs to use a spreadsheet actually considers using its product (and not a growing list of competitors’ software). But a glamorous debut on the New York Stock Exchange stage could help.

]]>http://fortune.com/2013/05/20/the-ipo-market-is-back-for-enterprise-tech/feed/0srivathslakshmiGoogle Android’s enterprise problemhttp://fortune.com/2013/05/17/google-androids-enterprise-problem/
http://fortune.com/2013/05/17/google-androids-enterprise-problem/#commentsFri, 17 May 2013 13:23:00 +0000http://test-alley.fortune.com/2013/05/17/google-androids-enterprise-problem/]]>FORTUNE — This week's Google I/O conference in San Francisco was disappointingly light on Android news. And it was especially light on new, enterprise-friendly features for Android devices. Instead, it showed improvements aimed at consumers and education institutions. But while Google may not seem focused on making its mobile operating system more attractive to IT departments, other companies are stepping in to fill the void.

Android devices have majority market share worldwide, but when it comes to the workplace, Apple's AAPL iPhones and iPads still rule. That's at least partly due to security and manageability concerns (not to mention the fragmentation, or many different flavors) of Google GOOG devices. According to a recent report from McAfee, an Intel INTC company, 97% of malware detected on mobile devices were designed to attack Android.

Aside from some incremental improvements, Google hasn't gotten serious about fixing the vulnerabilities in its app store and making its open-source OS more friendly to corporate buyers. Meanwhile, Samsung — the top seller of devices that run on Android — has stepped up and added enterprise-ready security features in its own version of the operating system. There's Samsung Safe for Enterprise (SAFE), which provides management tools for IT departments to control and secure devices, and KNOX, which separates users' personal and work data. Not surprisingly, Samsung devices are the only Android phones with a somewhat significant — though still minor — presence in the workplace.

Earlier this week, VMware VMW launched yet another tool for managing Android phones. The new software lets IT administrators set passwords and approve applications

And then there's BlackBerry BBRY. At its own conference, which also took place this week, the once-leading smartphone maker unveiled an updated version of the BlackBerry Enterprise Service that extends its security features to Android (and Apple's iOS) devices. BlackBerry says this new solution would secure email, calendar, contacts, tasks, memos, browsing, and document editing for rival platforms. It would also allow customers to "app wrap, " separating between corporate applications and personal content and eliminate the need to log in to a virtual private network (VPN) in order to securely transmit or receive data.

"Extending BlackBerry security, device, and application management to iOS and Android frees our customers from the need to invest in multiple device management technologies, giving them an easy and cost-effective upgrade path to a solution that supports their entire mobile environment globally," David Smith, EVP of enterprise mobile computing at BlackBerry said in a release.

Extending to new platforms is a good plan for BlackBerry, whose flailing OS is behind iOS, Android, and now, even Microsoft'sMSFT Windows Phone. Google's OS leads the pack with about 75% of smartphones shipped in the first quarter of this year, according to a recent report from research firm IDC. But even with a whopping 900 million Android device activations to date, Google needs all the help it can get when it comes to the enterprise — even if it comes from a flailing rival like BlackBerry.

]]>http://fortune.com/2013/05/17/google-androids-enterprise-problem/feed/0srivathslakshmiIntel and ARM: New leaders, same battlehttp://fortune.com/2013/05/14/intel-and-arm-new-leaders-same-battle/
http://fortune.com/2013/05/14/intel-and-arm-new-leaders-same-battle/#commentsTue, 14 May 2013 09:54:32 +0000http://test-alley.fortune.com/2013/05/14/intel-and-arm-new-leaders-same-battle/]]>FORTUNE — Much has been made of the upcoming leadership transitions at chip rivals ARM ARMH and Intel INTC. But it's unlikely that the battle plan will change for either side. Both companies chose long-time insiders to take the helm--Intel COO Brian Krzanich will become CEO later this week, and ARM's Simon Segars, currently the company's president, takes over in July. So it’s hard to imagine sweeping changes in either camp. Besides, it’s not clear that ARM, which licenses its chip architecture to the likes of Qualcomm QCOM and Nvidia NVDA, is in need of massive transformation. Though much smaller than Intel, the British chip designer isn’t dependent on the lackluster PC market. ARM-based chips power 95% of mobile phones, and the company is now trying to venture into new markets like lower-power servers. Fortune recently caught up with Segars, ARM’s incoming CEO, to find out about his plans for the company, the rivalry with Intel and the state of Moore’s Law.

FORTUNE: You're often viewed as head-to-head competitors with Intel, yet you have such a different model. Is it fair to constantly compare you to them?

Segars: Intel is a semiconductor company; we are not. Qualcomm, Samsung, Nvidia, Marvell, etc. are semiconductor companies. In the mobile device, the competition is between Intel and all those other guys. All those other guys use the ARM architecture and are dependent on us to keep that relevant. But at the business level it's Intel competing against ARM's customers. For our part we take that very seriously. It's a competition for sockets among Intel and our licensees, and we can't just sait there and say, “Sorry you lost that one.” Because if those sockets are lost, then it impacts our volumes and our royalties. So we need to be sure that we keep developing great microprocessor technology to help support our customers in creating products which deliver the best user experience.

I think it's the partnership base. You can have great technology, but the best technology doesn't always win out. For us it's been the combination of great technology deployed through the business model that has made ARM successful, and it's helped people build innovative devices at lower cost. I think the benefit of that has been greater diversity in the silicon that's enabled greater diversity in the end product. It's about enabling choice so that as a consumer you can go into a store and go, "I'll have that one." You've got a lot of choice there because there is money available through the supply chain for innovation to happen at different points, unlike PCs where two people have controlled it and the person that makes PCs runs on 2% profit margin and can't afford to innovate in anything other than which shade of grey the plastic is.

Are there changes that need to take place at ARM?

Under Warren's [East, ARM’s current CEO] leadership we've had an incredibly stable team. But over the last couple of years it's no secret that a couple of executives who've been there a long time have left. The current team is different from the team that got us here. I've been there a long time. My challenge right now is making sure that the team continues the path forward that we've enjoyed the last couple of decades. There's nothing structural about ARM's business that says the model that we have doesn't apply anymore. In fact what we have is even more applicable today as we face economic challenges and technology challenges. This partnership model is a great way of addressing this. So that doesn't worry me at all, and the demand for semiconductors doesn't worry me at all. It’s about keeping it all going — making sure that the leadership team at ARM is effective, that employees get where we're going, that as the company grows we don't lose the culture. These are not unique challenges to ARM.

What's different about the conversation around Moore’s Law today versus 10 or 20 years ago? (Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors the industry can place on a computer chip will double every 18 to 24 months).

What's different is that there's enough history to say the technical challenges can get solved. What people now talk about is, now that we've solved them, is it economically viable to use the technology solutions. That's what people are worrying about more now on the Moore's Law conversation than they ever were. Previously it was about what are we going to do to shrink the transistors. The cost per transistors has gone down exponentially. Moore's law isn't a law, there's no natural thing behind it. It's a prediction that has held up. Now people are worried about does the cost per transistor start to go up, and if it does, what do you do about that. There's plenty of research going on into alternate materials, carbon nanotubes, all these things are being worked on in a lab somewhere to keep scaling. But whether you can afford the solution at the end of the day is the challenge. I'm not worried about people saying, well unless the next generation comes along the world will end. There are plenty of ways to use the technology as it exists today in more and more creative ways.

Your current CEO is leaving at a rather young age, and Paul Otellini (Intel’s outgoing CEO) is stepping down ahead of when everybody expected. Why do you think this is?

I can't speak for Paul Otellini, but I've known Warren very well, and he's been the CEO of ARM for 12 years, which is a long time to be a CEO. It's clearly a demanding job. It is 24/7, and you fly a lot. At some point in anyone's life you say, “You know, I'd like to go do something else for a while.” Warren's been doing this a long time. He wants to hand it over to someone else. We share a lot of common philosophies, but naturally we're different people, we'll have a different approach. I've got a little bit of an age advantage on him, and hopefully I can put up with lapping the planet for a few more years, and based on my knowledge of the company I can keep moving us in the right direction.